“
I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!
I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive.
Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial!
I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers.
I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail.
But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant.
I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn.
I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity.
I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!
”
”
George Carlin
“
Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.
”
”
Pete Walker
“
Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
Three platonic fuck buddies and a hyperactive dog. What could possibly go wrong?
”
”
Emily Rath (Pucking Around (Jacksonville Rays, #1))
“
Happy wife, happy life.
”
”
Paul Orfalea (Copy This!: Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic who Turned a Bright Idea Into One of America's Best Companies)
“
She's always getting into trouble because she gets bored really really easily. [...]
My mum says it's because Celia has an attention span the size of a sesame seed.
Celia's mum says it's because Celia's identity is unfurling itself slowly, like a tulip bud, and it's a breathtakingly beautiful thing to see.
”
”
Jaclyn Moriarty (Feeling Sorry for Celia (Ashbury/Brookfield, #1))
“
She pulled her blonde hair back into a high ponytail, which somehow drew even more attention to her chest. "I don't mean the right guy to marry, honey. I mean the right guy to get your blood pumping. To make you turn off your analytical, judgmental, hyperactive brain and think with your body instead."
"Bodies can't think."
"SEE!" She said. "Analytical. Judgmental.
”
”
Cora Carmack (Losing It (Losing It, #1))
“
The goal of management is to remove obstacles.
”
”
Paul Orfalea (Copy This!: Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic who Turned a Bright Idea Into One of America's Best Companies)
“
Accountants are in the past, managers are in the present, and leaders are in the future.
”
”
Paul Orfalea (Copy This!: Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic who Turned a Bright Idea Into One of America's Best Companies)
“
I like to think I’m a pretty chill person, but right now? I was fretting worse than a granny with her best china in a room of hyperactive toddlers.
”
”
Annette Marie (Three Mages and a Margarita (The Guild Codex: Spellbound, #1))
“
From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They are not infections, but infarctions; they do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an excess of positivity. Therefore, they elude all technologies and techniques that seek to combat what is alien.
”
”
Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society)
“
If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hyperme-diated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read –slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. ‘Writing has never been capitalism’s thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate’, Deleuze
”
”
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
“
Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic.
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
One of the most promising developments since the publication of “The Geek Syndrome” has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.
”
”
Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
“
neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.
”
”
Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
“
Tearing through the room like an F5 tornado of hyperactive joy was Taylor Hawkins, my brother from another mother, my best friend, a man for whom I would take a bullet. Upon first meeting, our bond was immediate, and we grew closer with every day, every song, every note that we ever played together. I am not afraid to say that our chance meeting was a kind of love at first sight, igniting a musical “twin flame” that still burns to this day. Together, we have become an unstoppable duo, onstage and off, in pursuit of any and all adventure we can find. We are absolutely meant to be, and I am grateful that we found each other in this lifetime.
”
”
Dave Grohl (The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music)
“
Make your customers comfortable and they will give you their lives.
”
”
Paul Orfalea (Copy This!: Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic who Turned a Bright Idea Into One of America's Best Companies)
“
Every age has its signature afflictions. Thus, a bacterial age existed; at the latest, it ended with the discovery of antibiotics. Despite widespread fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
”
”
Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society)
“
This shit would make a hyperactive kid snore his way through Halloween.
”
”
L.J. Shen (Tyed)
“
I view game shows as welfare for the hyperactive.
”
”
Jennifer Ball (Higher Math: The Book Moose Minnion Never Wrote)
“
My alphabet hates itself. Like ... imagine someone says, ‘Think outside the box.’ My hyperactive mind creates a sphere and laughs at the box and researches for hours on end how much better spheres are. Then my Autism freaks out that I broke the rules without realising there were any, and wonders why we are supposed to think
inside cardboard boxes in the first place. Surely being inside cardboard boxes isn’t comfortable.
”
”
Anna Whateley
“
she knew that if I was allowed even a tiny amount of sugar, not only would I become intensely hyperactive, but the entire scope of my existence would funnel down to the singular goal of obtaining and ingesting more sugar. My need for sugar would become so massive
”
”
Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half)
“
Drugs have a long history of use in magic in various cultures, and usually in the context of either ecstatic communal rituals or in personal vision quests. However compared to people in simple pastoral tribal situations most people in developed countries now live in a perpetual state of mental hyperactivity with overactive imaginations anyway, so throwing drugs in on top of this usually just leads to confusion and a further loss of focus.
Plus as the real Shamans say, if you really do succeed in opening a door with a drug it will thereafter open at will and most such substances give all they will ever give on the first attempt.
”
”
Peter J. Carroll (The Octavo: A Sorcerer-Scientist's Grimoire)
“
Face-book has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!
”
”
Cory Doctorow (Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future)
“
My eternal fear is that if, for a brief moment, I stopped talking... you know, the whole spectacular appearance would disintegrate; people would think there is nobody and nothing there. This is my fear, as if I am nothing who pretends all the time to be somebody and has to be hyperactive all the time... just to fascinate people enough so that they don't notice that there is nothing.
”
”
Slavoj Žižek
“
There was an advertisement in the newspaper for a teaching position in a school with the worst reputation in town, with the sort of class that no qualified teacher with all the parts of her brain correctly screwed together would voluntarily face. It was attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder before attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder had been invented. “There’s no hope for these boys and girls,” the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. “This is not education, this is storage.” Maybe Sonja understood how it felt to be described as such. The vacant position attracted only one applicant, and she got those boys and girls to read Shakespeare.
”
”
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
“
How to make twenty freshmen hyperactive: 1. Give them access to an espresso machine. 2. Offer them a safe haven after seventy-two hours of running from death. 3. Feed them a home-cooked meal made by an orangutan. 4. Tell them that tomorrow, they will get to see a make-believe submarine from the 1800s that is actually not make-believe.
”
”
Rick Riordan (Daughter of the Deep)
“
In Western culture, the joyous shouting of children often irritates us because it interferes with our depression. That is why we have invented a term, hyperactivity, so that we can, in good conscience, sedate the spontaneous joy in many of our children.
”
”
Ronald Rolheiser (The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality)
“
The schizophrenic... will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret," Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (Chaosophy). Schizophrenics aren't sunk into themselves. Associatively, they're hyperactive. The world gets cremy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they're emotionally right there, they don't just formulate, observe. They're willing to become the situated person's expectations. "The schizophrenic has lightning access to you," Félix continued. "He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system." This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when doen empathy turn into dissolution?
”
”
Chris Kraus (I Love Dick)
“
There's no point in bragging in the good times. Your friends don't need to hear it and your enemies won't believe it anyway.
”
”
Paul Orfalea (Copy This!: Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic who Turned a Bright Idea Into One of America's Best Companies)
“
Better hyperactive rather than radioactive, I always say.
”
”
Stephanie Tom
“
She opened the door within two seconds of his pressing the doorbell, letting out a stream of cats that ran around with such rapidity and randomness of motion that they assumed a liquid state of furry purringness. The exact quantity could have been as low as three or as high as one hundred eight; no one could ever tell as they were all so dangerously hyperactive.
”
”
Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy (Nursery Crime, #1))
“
Your thoughts really matter. They can either help or hurt your deep limbic system. Left unchecked, ANTs will cause an infection in your whole bodily system. Whenever you notice ANTs, you need to crush them or they’ll affect your relationships, your work, and your entire life. First you need to notice them. If you can catch them at the moment they occur and correct them, you take away the power they have over you. When a negative thought goes unchallenged, your mind believes it and your body reacts to it. ANTs have an illogical logic. By bringing them into the open and examining them on a conscious level, you can see for yourself how little sense it really makes to think these kinds of things to yourself. You take back control over your own life instead of leaving your fate to hyperactive limbic-conditioned negative thought patterns. Sometimes people have trouble talking back to these grossly unpleasant thoughts because they
”
”
Daniel G. Amen (Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness)
“
Death always wins. Life is just a blip. It's a shiny, hyperactive blip, but a blip nonetheless, and no matter how strong or wily or rich a life may be, the slippery slope always leads to the great nothing.
”
”
Daniel José Older (Salsa Nocturna: Stories (Bone Street Rumba, #2.5))
“
Starvation was the first indication of my self-discipline. I was devoted to anorexia. I went the distance of memorizing the calorie content within every bite of food while calculating the exact amount of exercise I needed to burn double my consumption. I was luckily young enough to mask my excessive exercise with juvenile hyperactivity. Nobody thought twice about the fact that I was constantly rollerblading, biking, and running for hours in stifling summer humidity. I learned to cut my food into tiny bites and move it around my plate. I read that standing burned more calories than sitting, so I refused to watch television without doing crunches, leg lifts, or at least walking in place. When socially forced to soldier through a movie, I tapped my foot in desperation to knock out about seventy-five extra calories. From age eleven to twelve, I dropped forty pounds and halted the one period I’d had.
”
”
Maggie Georgiana Young (Just Another Number)
“
One stretch of the gene is repeated a variable number of times, and the version with seven repeats (the “7R” form) produces a receptor protein that is sparse in the cortex and relatively unresponsive to dopamine. This is the variant associated with a host of related traits—sensation and novelty seeking, extroversion, alcoholism, promiscuity, less sensitive parenting, financial risk taking, impulsivity, and, probably most consistently, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder).
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
An imbalance of these neurotransmitters is why some people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) come across as stress junkies. They have to get stressed to focus. It’s one of the primary factors in procrastination. People learn to wait until the Sword of Damocles is ready to fall—it’s only then, when stress unleashes norepinephrine and dopamine, that they can sit down and do the work.
”
”
John J. Ratey (Spark!: How exercise will improve the performance of your brain)
“
In the course of general acceleration and hyperactivity we are also losing the capacity for rage. Rage has a characteristic temporality incompatible with generalized acceleration and hyperactivity, which admit no breadth of time. The future shortens into a protracted present. It lacks all negativity, which would permit one to look at the Other. In contrast, rage puts the present as a whole into question. It presupposes an interrupting pause in the present... The general distraction afflicting contemporary society does not allow the emphasis nd energy of rage to arise.
”
”
Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society)
“
So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole. I suffer from recurrent bouts of nausea in the face of this densely woven tissue of “arguments,” most of which are nothing but blinds for something else altogether, generally something unsavory; and I feel an urgent need to exit from it altogether.
”
”
Raymond Geuss (A World without Why)
“
ADD is a neurological syndrome whose classic defining triad of symptoms include impulsivity, distractibility, and hyperactivity or excess energy.
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
“
Get Off Your Ritalin and Adderall. The whole point of life is to enjoy your Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
”
”
E. Jean Carroll (HUNTER: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson)
“
Caffeine has a paradoxical effect on hyperactive children with attention-deficit disorder:
”
”
Mark Pendergrast (Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World)
“
studies have failed to find any
substantial evidence proving a relationship between sugar consumption and hyperactivity.
”
”
Mark Leyner (Why Do Men Have Nipples?: Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini)
“
We need no extra cunning, no new ideas, no unnecessary gadgets, no frantic hyperactivity - all we need is less rationality.
”
”
Rolf Dobelli
“
In the course of general acceleration and hyperactivity we are also losing the capacity for rage
”
”
Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society)
“
The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.
”
”
Cal Newport (A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload)
“
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid fifties and I was given Ritalin and Dexedrine. These are stimulant medications. They elevate the level of a chemical called dopamine in the brain. And dopamine is the motivation chemical, so when you are more motivated you pay attention. Your mind won't be all over the place. So we elevate dopamine levels with stimulant drugs like Ritalin, Aderall, Dexedrine and so on.
But what else elevates Dopamine levels? Well, all other stimulants do. What other stimulants? Cocaine, crystal meth, caffeine, nicotine, which is to say that a significant minority of people that use stimulants, illicit stimulants, you know what they are actually doing? They're self-medicating their ADHD or their depression or their anxiety. So on one level (and we have to go deeper that that), but on one level addictions are about self-medications.
If you look at alcoholics in one study, 40% of male adult alcoholics met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD? Why? Because alcohol soothes the hyperactive brain. Cannabis does the same thing. And in studies of stimulant addicts, about 30% had ADHD prior to their drug use. What else do people self-medicate? Someone mentioned depression. So, if you have been treated for depression, as I have been, and you were given a SSRI medication, these medications elevate the level of another brain chemical called serotonin, which is implicated in mood regulation. What else elevates serotonin levels temporarily in the brain? Cocaine does. People use cocaine to self-medicate depression. People use alcohol, cannabis and opiates to self-medicate anxiety.
Incidentally people also use gambling or shopping to self-medicate because these activities also elevate dopamine levels in the brain. There is no difference between one addiction and the other. They're just different targets, but the brain systems that are involved and the target chemicals are the same, no matter what the addiction. So people self-medicate anxiety, depression. People self-medicate bipolar disorder with alcohol. People self-medicate Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.
So, one way to understand addictions is that they're self-medicating. And that's important to understand because if you are working with people who are addicted it is really important to know what's going on in their lives and why are they doing this. So apart from the level of comfort and pain relief, there's usually something diagnosible that's there at the same time. And you have to pay attention to that. At least you have to talk about it.
”
”
Gabor Maté
“
Consider the genesis of a single-celled embryo produced by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The genetic material of this embryo comes from two sources: paternal genes (from sperm) and maternal genes (from eggs). But the cellular material of the embryo comes exclusively from the egg; the sperm is no more than a glorified delivery vehicle for male DNA—a genome equipped with a hyperactive tail. Aside from proteins, ribosomes, nutrients, and membranes, the egg also supplies the embryo with specialized structures called mitochondria. These mitochondria are the energy-producing factories of the cell; they are so anatomically discrete and so specialized in their function that cell biologists call them “organelles”—i.e., mini-organs resident within cells. Mitochondria, recall, carry a small, independent genome that resides within the mitochondrion itself—not in the cell’s nucleus, where the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (and the 21,000-odd human genes) can be found. The exclusively female origin of all the mitochondria in an embryo has an important consequence. All humans—male or female—must have inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, who inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, and so forth, in an unbroken line of female ancestry stretching indefinitely into the past. (A woman also carries the mitochondrial genomes of all her future descendants in her cells; ironically, if there is such a thing as a “homunculus,” then it is exclusively female in origin—technically, a “femunculus”?) Now imagine an ancient tribe of two hundred women, each of whom bears one child. If the child happens to be a daughter, the woman dutifully passes her mitochondria to the next generation, and, through her daughter’s daughter, to a third generation. But if she has only a son and no daughter, the woman’s mitochondrial lineage wanders into a genetic blind alley and becomes extinct (since sperm do not pass their mitochondria to the embryo, sons cannot pass their mitochondrial genomes to their children). Over the course of the tribe’s evolution, tens of thousands of such mitochondrial lineages will land on lineal dead ends by chance, and be snuffed out. And here is the crux: if the founding population of a species is small enough, and if enough time has passed, the number of surviving maternal lineages will keep shrinking, and shrinking further, until only a few are left. If half of the two hundred women in our tribe have sons, and only sons, then one hundred mitochondrial lineages will dash against the glass pane of male-only heredity and vanish in the next generation. Another half will dead-end into male children in the second generation, and so forth. By the end of several generations, all the descendants of the tribe, male or female, might track their mitochondrial ancestry to just a few women. For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name—Mitochondrial Eve.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
ADHD is crazy, actually. My brain, how fast it moves at any given moment—that the hyperactivity, it’s not me bouncing off walls, it’s a thousand thoughts each minute bouncing off the walls in my head.
”
”
Jessa Hastings (Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark (Magnolia Parks Universe, #5))
“
the dysregulation of the body’s neurobiological system, that impairs one’s ability to pay selective attention to one’s surroundings. The world becomes a land without street signs, the individual a car in bad need of a tune-up. The vastness of the attentional system partially accounts for the variation of ADD “types.” Where one individual needs an oil change, the next needs spark plugs replaced. Where one individual is withdrawn and overwhelmed by stimuli, the next is hyperactive and can’t get enough stimuli. Where one is frequently anxious, the other is depressed. To compensate, each develops his or her own coping strategies that developmentally add to, or subtract from, the brain’s various subsystems. So Mr. A becomes a stand-up comedian, and manic. Ms. B becomes an architectural wizard with obsessive-compulsive traits. Their offspring become a sculptor and a stunt pilot. None of them can balance their checkbook. And all of them wish they had more time in the day. With such diversity in the disorder,
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
“
The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
”
”
Cal Newport (A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload)
“
As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it’s not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.
”
”
Cal Newport (A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload)
“
The longer I have been on the raw food path, the more I tend to come full circle and return to where my original ideas and inspiration of wanting to eat raw food come from - and that’s natural hygiene and its principles.
”
”
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek (RAW FOOD FOR CHILDREN: Protect Your Child from Cancer, Hyperactivity, Autism, Diabetes, Allergies, Behavioral Problems, Obesity, ADHD & More)
“
Children who are seriously neglected during their early development also have smaller brains (fig. 7); their intelligence and linguistic and fine motor control are permanently impaired, and they are impulsive and hyperactive.
”
”
D.F. Swaab (We Are Our Brains: A Neurobiography of the Brain, from the Womb to Alzheimer's)
“
He became closest to Eric Idle, the most hyperactive of the troupe, who was exactly his age and a competent guitarist and, moreover, had to fight Cleese and Palin for screen time just as he used to John and Paul for album time.
”
”
Philip Norman (George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle)
“
nose. Many children who have sleep apnea may exhibit changes in daytime behavior, such as hyperactivity or lack of attention, irritability, anger, or hostile behaviors. They often demonstrate a decrease in performance at school.
”
”
Lindsay Talbot (Sleep Apnea: Your Worst Nightmare Is Now Revealed)
“
It is not unusual for children with ADHD, especially those who are not hyperactive and are very bright, to do quite well in elementary school, where they spend a significant portion of each school day in one classroom with a single teacher who can provide considerable structure and stability for each student in that stable group. The teacher gets to know each student and can support her in her academic work and in resolving difficulties in social relationships.
”
”
Thomas E. Brown (Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD)
“
In 1967, the architect Lewis Mumford wrote of the human brain as a 'neural efflorescence' like those 'in the botanical realm', one of those 'extravagances and exuberances of nature' in which evolution overreaches itself:
The very excess of 'brainness' set a problem for man not unlike that of finding a way of utilizing a high explosive trough inventing a casing strong enough to hold the charge and deliver it.
This, he argued, must have proved maladaptive, thus endangering the survival of early humans. Nature's grandest flower was drooping under its own luxuriant weight. Mumford suggested that it was only by unloading and storing this 'hyperactivity' into 'cultural containers', damning up our sapient surplus in the supererogations of art and curiosity, that our species has avoided 'behaving like a racing motor that burns itself out for lack of a load'. But latent self-destructive potential still lurked just beneath the surface.
”
”
Thomas Moynihan (X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction)
“
When you see the extent to which people try, like the tremors of a ballet dancer, or the intensity of a pianist, or a mural containing the details of tiny little people making up the background-- you see the vulnerable extension of our private selves. There is an element inside us and it wavers between beauty and madness. You know it when you see it, like a hyperactive atom bouncing in a tube. It is like trying, really trying, and when we do, we are in our most honest forms. When we reach, we expose the contents of the human spirit. The more often we see it spill, the more encouraged we are to go further. And we can go further than others, in joyous competition. After all, it is called the human race, no?
”
”
Kristian Ventura (Can I Tell You Something?)
“
Tumor angiogenesis exploits the same pathways that are used when blood vessels are created to heal wounds. Nothing is invented; nothing is extraneous. Cancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
“
The worst thing one can do for a hyperactive child is to put him or her in front of a television set. Television activates the child at the same time that it cuts the child (or adult) off from real sensory stimulation and the opportunity for resolution.
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Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television)
“
Those five days we were locked up together at Vasa Luigi's, that wasn't an effect of the imprisonment, was it? That's the way you really are, when you're well?"
"Pretty much," he admitted.
"I've always wondered what adult hyperactives did for a living.
”
”
Lois McMaster Bujold (Mirror Dance (Vorkosigan Saga, #8))
“
You're not a lawyer, are you?' asked the nurse suspiciously. 'One of those geniuses who gets a
degree while they're still in nappies?'
Artemis sighed. 'A genius, yes. A lawyer, hardly. I am, mademoiselle, a customer.'
And suddenly the nurse was all charm.
'Oh, a customer! Why didn't you say so? I'll show you right in. Would sir care for tea, coffee or
perhaps something stronger?'
'I am thirteen years old, mademoiselle.'
'A juice?'
'Tea would be fine. Earl Grey if you have it. No sugar, obviously; it might make me
hyperactive.
”
”
Eoin Colfer (Eternity Code, The-Artemis Fowl, Book 3)
“
A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services. The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector.
”
”
Cal Newport (A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload)
“
We have nothing against playing video games; they have many good features and benefits. Our concern is that when they are played to excess, especially in social isolation, they can hinder a young man's ability and interest in developing his face-to-face social skills. Multiple problems, including obesity, violence, anxiety, lower school performance, social phobia and shyness, greater impulsivity and depression, have all been associated with excessive gaming. The variety and intensity of video game action makes other parts of life, like school, seem comparatively boring, and that creates a problem with their academic performance, which in turn might require medication to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which then leads to other problems down the road in a disastrous negative cycle...
”
”
Philip G. Zimbardo (Man, Interrupted: Why Young Men are Struggling & What We Can Do About It)
“
In the absence of better information we can only hypothesize that many diseases such as multiple sclerosis, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and pancreatic cancer, as well as afflictions such as generalized lower back pain, are cases of evolutionary mismatch.
”
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Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
“
The principle is clear: biochemical manipulations that strengthen political stability, social order and economic growth are allowed and even encouraged (e.g. those that calm hyperactive kids in school, or drive anxious soldiers forward into battle). Manipulations that threaten stability and growth are banned.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
The other response is less obvious at first. They do the opposite. They become hyperactive. They accept every opportunity presented. They throw themselves into every assignment. They tackle every challenge with gusto. They try to do it all. This behaviour does not necessarily look like learned helplessness at first glance. After all, isn’t working hard evidence of one’s belief in one’s importance and value? Yet on closer examination we can see this compulsion to do more is a smokescreen. These people don’t believe they have a choice in what opportunity, assignment, or challenge to take on. They believe they “have to do it all.
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”
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
“
The major impairments of ADD — the distractibility, the hyperactivity and the poor impulse control — reflect, each in its particular way, a lack of self-regulation. Self-regulation implies that someone can direct attention where she chooses, can control impulses and can be consciously mindful and in charge of what her body is doing. Like time literacy, self-regulation is also a distinct task of development in human life, achieved gradually from young childhood through adolescence and adulthood. We are born with no capacity whatsoever to self-regulate emotion or action.
For self-regulation to be possible, specific brain centers have to develop and grow connections with other important nerve centers, and chemical pathways need to be established. Attention deficit disorder is a prime illustration of how the adult continues to struggle with the unsolved problems of childhood. She is held back precisely where the child did not develop, hampered in those areas where the infant or toddler got stuck during the course of development.
”
”
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
“
As the sun went down outside, the television screen started completely lighting up the room in obnoxiously bright colors at hyperactive speeds. The conversation had been slowly rising in volume and frequency, as everyone started becoming more delinquent and the social boundaries slowly wore away.
I don't remember what any of them said because I wasn't honestly paying any attention. I was focusing on my own misery and trying to numb the inner demons, the ugly things Thomas claimed came from the Outside World. Yet, to me, it wasn't outside, but rather INSIDE, as in my own head. I kept hearing Charley's voice from bits and pieces of conversations we had, laughter that I'll never hear ever again.
”
”
J.C. Joranco (Say It Ain't So)
“
Unlike his studious father, fascinated by the occult, Akbar can never be made to sit and study, preferring by far the company of his racing pigeons, dogs, horses and companions in arms. He never will learn to read and will remain effectively illiterate, the only Mughal padshah to be so, possibly due to his hyperactive nature exacerbated by extreme dyslexia.
”
”
Ira Mukhoty (Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire)
“
Nothing is invented; nothing is extraneous. Cancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies)
“
The Geek Syndrome” has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.
”
”
Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
“
Women with AD/HD also sometimes have difficulty with their relationships when invited to parties or family gatherings. Quite often they feel bombarded by too much stimulation, especially women without hyperactivity, and therefore withdraw, sometimes offending people without intending to as we discussed in earlier Chapter 9. They feel overloaded and exhausted, and they can’t keep up. They might have difficulty carrying on a good conversation, trying to think of what to say in the middle of so much activity. Many women with AD/HD mysteriously retreat to another room, become quiet, upset or withdrawn, or just don’t show up for these kinds of events. All these responses may give the message to others that you don’t care about them. They don’t know that you’re having a hard time or why.
”
”
Sari Solden (Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life)
“
Far more than a quest for pleasure, chronic substance use is the addict’s attempt to escape distress. From a medical point of view, addicts are self-medicating conditions like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress or even ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anaesthetics.
Heroin and cocaine, both powerful physical painkillers, also ease psychological discomfort. Infant animals separated from their mothers can be soothed readily by low doses of narcotics, just as if it was actual physical pain they were enduring. The pain pathways in humans are no different. The very same brain centres that interpret and “feel” physical pain also become activated during the experience of emotional rejection: on brain scans they “light up” in response to social ostracism just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli.
When people speak of feeling “hurt” or of having emotional “pain,” they are not being abstract or poetic but scientifically quite precise. The hard-drug addict’s life has been marked by a surfeit of pain. No wonder she desperately craves relief.
”
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
“
Let’s Convince Him He’s Addicted for Life Parents consent to their children’s treatment for diseases other than taking drugs. One of the most common groups of childhood diseases is “learning disabilities,” including especially hyperactivity. Are such learning disabilities permanent? One piece of research showed that, “Contrary to the expectations of many experts, . . . boys who are hyperactive do not always have
”
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Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
“
Noble starets, tell me, are my high spirits offensive to you or not?" Fyodor Pavlovich suddenly exclaimed, gripping the arms of his chair with both hands and appearing ready to leap out of it, depending on the reply.
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
“
Hyper-aroused youth can look hyperactive or inattentive because what they are attending to is the teacher’s tone of voice or the other children’s body language, not the content of their lessons. The aggression and impulsivity that the fight or flight response provokes can also appear as defiance or opposition, when in fact it is the remnants of a response to some prior traumatic situation that the child has somehow been prompted to recall. The “freezing” response that the body makes when stressed—sudden immobility, like a deer caught in the headlights—is also often misinterpreted as defiant refusal by teachers because, when it occurs, the child literally cannot respond to commands. While not all ADD, hyperactivity and oppositional-defiant disorder are trauma-related, it is likely that the symptoms that lead to these diagnoses are trauma-related more often than anyone has begun to suspect.
”
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Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
“
He knew factories. No one had fun in factories. They sweltered and slaved, hunched and harried, people reduced to things, manufacturing so much meaningless plastic shit that made no one happy, poisoned the oceans, corrupted the food chain.
The modern world was a burning bus speeding toward a cliff with a maniac at the wheel. And he was not apart, but complicit, a hyperactive child making yuk-yuks in his seat, keeping everyone laughing, distracting them from certain doom.
”
”
Jim Carrey (Memoirs and Misinformation)
“
Mania. One minute, you’re lost, and the next minute…you’re found. You are the sole creator of your own destiny. A rush of extreme adrenaline kicks in. Your heart accelerates at an unfathomable speed, along with the thoughts in your mind. The anxiety fuels the mania even more. It hits you at full speed out of nowhere. You are no longer bound by the limits of your physical body. You can be anything, or anyone, you want to be. There are no fucking limits. No consequences. No distractions. Everything makes sense… And yet nothing does. Everything has meaning… And yet nothing does. And still, everything is absolutely fucking beautiful. Life is beautiful. You’re running on hyperactive-controlled clarity. Nothing is impossible in that moment. The world is yours to create. To own. Seeing is art. Hearing is music. Breathing is living. You are high. So incredibly high. You take chances. Risks. Because why the fuck not? Your illness is not mental. …You’re finally free. … Until… you crash. And… …burn.
”
”
Molly Doyle (Bloodshed (Order of the Unseen #1))
“
My interview was mostly conducted by Hugo Dyson, an Oxford ‘character’, known for his wit. I always found him alarming. He was like a hyperactive gnome, and stumped around on a walking stick which, when he was seized by one of his paroxysms of laughter, he would beat up and down as if trying to drive it through the floor. It brought to mind Rumpelstiltskin driving his leg into the ground in the fairy tale. He had been one of the ‘Inklings’ – the group of dons, including Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who met during the 1930s in the Bird and Baby pub opposite St John’s. It was he and Tolkien who, one summer night in 1931, had converted Lewis to Christianity during a stroll along Addison’s Walk. So he was, at least in part, responsible for the Narnia books. I never asked him if he liked them. But it was well known that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was not to his taste. Tolkien had been in the habit of favouring the Inklings with readings from it, but one day Dyson, driven to exasperation, interjected, ‘Oh not another fucking elf!’ and after that the readings stopped. On
”
”
John Carey (The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books)
“
evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging showing that patients with BPD have hyperactivity in the limbic areas of the brain, especially the amygdala, and hypoactivity in the prefrontal cortex [and] in complex interaction with childhood trauma common among borderline patients, can result in the . . . behavior recognized as the symptoms of BPD: impulsive aggression, lack of affective control, and a profound mistrust born out of early disruption in the development of emotional attachment.8 Obviously, psychological theories for BPD
”
”
Cathy Wiseman (Borderline Personality: A Scriptural Perspective (The Gospel for Real Life))
“
For example, increasing numbers of schoolchildren take stimulants such as Ritalin. In 2011, 3.5 million American children were taking medications for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). In the UK the number rose from 92,000 in 1997 to 786,000 in 2012.38 The original aim had been to treat attention disorders, but today completely healthy kids take such medications to improve their performance and live up to the growing expectations of teachers and parents.39 Many object to this development and argue that the problem lies with the education system rather than with the children.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
A longitudinal study of over a hundred hyperactive children and a matched comparison group followed into young adulthood showed that those whose ADHD persisted into adulthood continued to have significantly more difficulties with low frustration tolerance, impatience, irritability, hot temper, and emotional excitability than the comparison group. Another study demonstrated that deficient self-regulation of these negative feelings is found in a subgroup of adults with ADHD, and also that this type of emotional dysregulation tends to occur with greater frequency among siblings of those affected adults.
”
”
Thomas E. Brown (Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD)
“
Marshall was more effective at his job because of his ability to focus on important issues—giving each full attention before moving on to the next. If he had instead accepted the status quo of the War Department operation, with sixty officers pulling him into their decision making and hundreds of commands looking for his approval on routine activity, he would have fallen into the frantic and predictably busy whirlwind familiar to most managers, and this almost certainly would have harmed his performance. Indeed, if something like a hyperactive hive mind workflow had persisted in the 1940s War Department, we might have even lost the war.
”
”
Cal Newport (A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload)
“
Other early symptoms that begin to show up at the same time or shortly after those we just talked about can include:
• Hypervigilance (being “on guard” at all times)
• Intrusive imagery or flashbacks
• Extreme sensitivity to light and sound • Hyperactivity
• Exaggerated emotional and startle responses
• Nightmares and night terrors
• Abrupt mood swings (rage reactions or temper tantrums, frequent anger, or crying)
• Shame and lack of self-worth
• Reduced ability to deal with stress (easily and frequently stressed out)
• Difficulty sleeping
Several of these symptoms can also show up later, even years later. Remember, this list is not for diagnostic purposes.
”
”
Peter A. Levine
“
At the moment, most organizations remain stuck in the productivity quicksand of the hyperactive hive mind workflow, content to focus on tweaks meant to compensate for its worst excesses. It’s this mindset that leads to “solutions” like improving expectations around email response times or writing better subject lines. It leads us to embrace text autocomplete in Gmail, so we can write messages faster, or the search feature in Slack, so we can more quickly find what we’re looking for amid the scrum of back-and-forth chatter. These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes. It’s a small victory won in the wrong war.
”
”
Cal Newport (A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload)
“
First up, Blackwell [1972] did a set of experiments on fifty-seven college students to determine the effect of colour—as well as the number of tablets—on the effects elicited. The subjects were sitting through a boring hour-long lecture, and were given either one or two pills, which were either pink or blue. They were told that they could expect to receive either a stimulant or a sedative. Since these were psychologists, and this was back when you could do whatever you wanted to your subjects—even lie to them—the treatment that all the students received consisted simply of sugar pills, but of different colours. Afterwards, when they measured alertness—as well as any subjective effects—the researchers found that two pills were more effective than one, as we might have expected (and two pills were better at eliciting side-effects too). They also found that colour had an effect on outcome: the pink sugar tablets were better at maintaining concentration than the blue ones. Since colours in themselves have no intrinsic pharmacological properties, the difference in effect could only be due to the cultural meanings of pink and blue: pink is alerting, blue is cool. Another study suggested that Oxazepam, a drug similar to Valium (which was once unsuccessfully prescribed by our GP for me as a hyperactive child) was more effective at treating anxiety in a green tablet, and more effective for depression when yellow. Drug
”
”
Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)
“
ADHD is crazy, actually. My brain, how fast it moves at any given moment—that the hyperactivity, it’s not me bouncing off walls, it’s a thousand thoughts each minute bouncing off the walls in my head. And there are parts of it that are wonderful, I notice things other people don’t, I’m detail-oriented, I pick up patterns well, I think I’m quite clever, truthfully. I like how I think. I wasn’t sad when they diagnosed me with it, it made a lot of things about me make sense, and about us and how I am and how I can be and why—it answered a lot. It can be bad though. It can be a waterboarding of thoughts. Just—cloth over my brain’s face, and all the thoughts in the world being poured over my mouth and nose and you can’t breathe because if you do you’ll choke on them—
”
”
Jessa Hastings (Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark (Magnolia Parks Universe, #5))
“
The state hopes to regulate the biochemical pursuit of happiness, separating ‘bad’ manipulations from ‘good’ ones. The principle is clear: biochemical manipulations that strengthen political stability, social order and economic growth are allowed and even encouraged (e.g. those that calm hyperactive kids in school, or drive anxious soldiers forward into battle). Manipulations that threaten stability and growth are banned. But each year new drugs are born in the research labs of universities, pharmaceutical companies and criminal organisations, and the needs of the state and the market also keep changing. As the biochemical pursuit of happiness accelerates, so it will reshape politics, society and economics, and it will become ever harder to bring it under control.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
Something staticky and paranormally ventilated about the air, which drifted through a half-open window, late one afternoon, caused a delicately waking Paul, clutching a pillow and drooling a little, to believe he was a small child in Florida, in a medium-size house, on or near winter break. He felt dimly excited, anticipating a hyperactive movement of his body into a standing position, then was mostly unconscious for a vague amount of time until becoming aware of what seemed to be a baffling non sequitur—and, briefly, in its mysterious approach from some eerie distance, like someone else’s consciousness—before resolving plainly as a memory, of having already left Florida, at some point, to attend New York University. After a deadpan pause, during which the new information was accepted by default as recent, he casually believed it was autumn and he was in college, and as he felt that period’s particular gloominess he sensed a concurrent assembling, at a specific distance inside himself, of dozens of once-intimate images, people, places, situations. With a sensation of easily and entirely abandoning a prior context, of having no memory, he focused, as an intrigued observer, on this assembling and was surprised by an urge, which he immediately knew he hadn’t felt in months, or maybe years, to physically involve himself—by going outside and living each day patiently—in the ongoing, concrete occurrence of what he was passively, slowly remembering. But the emotion dispersed to a kind of nothingness—and its associated memories, like organs in a lifeless body, became rapidly indiscernible, dissembling by the metaphysical equivalent, if there was one, of entropy—as he realized, with some confusion and an oddly instinctual reluctance, blinking and discerning his new room, which after two months could still seem unfamiliar, that he was somewhere else, as a different person, in a much later year.
”
”
Tao Lin (Taipei)
“
Judgment is a challenging concept, full of contradictions. • We use judgment to guide us in our lives every day. We categorize our experiences into good, bad, and neutral, and that leads us to certain behaviors and decisions. In many ways, it makes life easier. • As Dr. Mark Bertin explains in his book, The ADHD Family Solution, judgment “leads us to wrestle with what is not in our control.” For example, it’s understandable that parents of children with challenges feel disappointed when they can’t control their children’s behaviors. If a hyperactive 10-year-old is bouncing off the walls or jumping on the furniture, frustrated parents may come to the judgment that this kid is disrespectful and won’t listen to them; or worse, that he’ll never live up to his potential. “Standing in judgment” does not serve our children—or us. Attaching a stigma to a behavior makes them feel like a failure, interfering with our ability to help them learn to improve that behavior.
”
”
Elaine Taylor-Klaus (The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids with ADHD, Anxiety, and More: What Parents and Teachers Really Need to Know to Empower Complicated Kids with Confidence and Calm)
“
ADHD Prescriptions: Diagnosis rates of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have skyrocketed 500 percent since 1991, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. An estimated 7 million schoolchildren are being treated with stimulants for ADHD, including ten percent of all ten-year-old American boys, according to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A 1998 study by researchers Adrian Angold and E. Jane Costello found that the majority of children and adolescents who receive stimulants for ADHD do not fully meet the criteria for ADHD. The efforts of neurologist Dr. Fred Baughman, ADHD diagnosis critic, led to admissions from the FDA, DEA, Novartis (manufacturers of Ritalin), and top ADHD researchers around the country that “no objective validation of the diagnosis of ADHD exists.” A Maryland Department of Education study found that white, suburban elementary school children are using medication for ADHD at more than twice the rate of African American students.
”
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Mark Sisson (The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy (Primal Blueprint Series))
“
How do you know if you’re in an infatuation? Here are the neurological markers according to Dr. Helen Fisher, a preeminent biological anthropologist who has written on the topic: • The lover focuses on the beloved’s better traits and overlooks or minimizes flaws. • Infatuated people exhibit extreme energy, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, impulsivity, euphoria, and mood swings. • One or both of the partners develops a goal-oriented fixation on winning the beloved. • Relational passion is heightened, not weakened, by adversity; the more the relationship is attacked, the more the passion grows. • The lovers become emotionally dependent on the relationship. • Partners reorder their daily priorities to remain in contact as much as humanly possible, and they even experience separation anxiety when apart. • Empathy is so powerful that many report they would “die for their beloved.” • An infatuated person thinks about their lover to an obsessive degree. • Sexual desire is intense, and the relationship becomes marked by extreme possessiveness.
”
”
Gary L. Thomas (The Sacred Search: What If It's Not about Who You Marry, But Why?)
“
...suggests [Psychological disorders] are not the result of a lack of order in the brain, but rather stem from an excess of order. When the grooves of self-reflective thinking deepen and harden, the ego becomes overbearing.This is perhaps most clearly evident in depression, when the ego turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality. Carhart-Harris cites research indicating that this debilitating state of mind (sometimes called heavy self consciousness or depressive realism) may be the result of a hyper-active Default Mode Network which can trap us in repetitive and destructive loops of rumination that eventually close us off from the world outside.
”
”
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics)
“
We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause.
The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective.
www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com
E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com
”
”
Justin Rodwen Hill
“
The first result of this randomized trial was predictable from prior studies: in the control group, children with the short variant-i.e., the "high risk" form of the gene- were twice as likely to veer toward high-risk behaviors, including binge drinking, drug use, and sexual promiscuity as adolescents, confirming earlier studies that had suggested an increased risk within this genetic subgroup. The second result was more provocative: these very children were also the most likely to respond to the social interventions. In the intervention group, children with the high-risk allele were most strongly and rapidly "normalized"-i.e., the most drastically affected subjects were also the best responders. In a parallel study, orphaned infants with the short variant of 5HTTLRP appeared more impulsive and socially disturbed than their long-variant counterparts as baseline-but were also the most likely to benefit from placement in a more nurturing foster-care environment.
In both cases, it seems, the short variant encodes a hyperactive "stress sensor" for psychic susceptibility, but also a sensor most likely to respond to an intervention that targets the susceptibility. The most brittle or fragile forms of psyche are the most likely to be distorted by trauma-inducing environments-but are also the most likely to be restored by targeted interventions. It is as if resilience itself has a genetic core: some humans are born resilient (but are less responsive to interventions), while others are born sensitive (but more likely to respond to changes in their environments.)
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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When a middle school teacher in San Antonio, Texas, named Rick Riordan began thinking about the troublesome kids in his class, he was struck by a topsy-turvy idea. Maybe the wild ones weren’t hyperactive; maybe they were misplaced heroes. After all, in another era the same behavior that is now throttled with Ritalin and disciplinary rap sheets would have been the mark of greatness, the early blooming of a true champion. Riordan played with the idea, imagining the what-ifs. What if strong, assertive children were redirected rather than discouraged? What if there were a place for them, an outdoor training camp that felt like a playground, where they could cut loose with all those natural instincts to run, wrestle, climb, swim, and explore? You’d call it Camp Half-Blood, Riordan decided, because that’s what we really are—half animal and half higher-being, halfway between each and unsure how to keep them in balance. Riordan began writing, creating a troubled kid from a broken home named Percy Jackson who arrives at a camp in the woods and is transformed when the Olympian he has inside is revealed, honed, and guided. Riordan’s fantasy of a hero school actually does exist—in bits and pieces, scattered across the globe. The skills have been fragmented, but with a little hunting, you can find them all. In a public park in Brooklyn, a former ballerina darts into the bushes and returns with a shopping bag full of the same superfoods the ancient Greeks once relied on. In Brazil, a onetime beach huckster is reviving the lost art of natural movement. And in a lonely Arizona dust bowl called Oracle, a quiet genius disappeared into the desert after teaching a few great athletes—and, oddly, Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers—the ancient secret of using body fat as fuel. But the best learning lab of all was a cave on a mountain behind enemy lines—where, during World War II, a band of Greek shepherds and young British amateurs plotted to take on 100,000 German soldiers. They weren’t naturally strong, or professionally trained, or known for their courage. They were wanted men, marked for immediate execution. But on a starvation diet, they thrived. Hunted and hounded, they got stronger. They became such natural born heroes, they decided to follow the lead of the greatest hero of all, Odysseus, and
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Christopher McDougall (Natural Born Heroes: Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance)
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Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.
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Ashim Shanker (Inward and Toward (Migrations, #3))
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The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it.
And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it.
However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid).
Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment.
So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions.
So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.
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Gabor Maté